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The Federal Trade Commission is encouraging companies to adopt age verification technologies by announcing that it will not enforce the Children’s Online Privacy Act against certain websites that collect and use the personal data of minors in order to verify their age.
“Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protecting technologies that have been introduced in decades,” said Christopher Movrage, director of the Consumer Protection Bureau. He said in a press release. “Our statement motivates operators to use these innovative tools, empowering parents to protect their children online.”
There are certain criteria websites must meet to avoid enforcement under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) rule, which generally requires commercial website operators to obtain parental consent to collect information about children under the age of 13. General or “mixed audience” sites will be allowed to collect minors’ data without verifiable parental consent “for the sole purpose of determining the user’s age” if they follow a host of other protocols: They must delete the data immediately after they finish using it for verification. the age; They can only disclose data to third-party service providers who have taken “reasonable steps to determine their ability to maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of the information”; They must provide clear notice about the information they will collect; They are expected to use reasonable security measures; They must try to ensure that the results will be “reasonably accurate”.
The statement was welcomed by many who favor age verification technologies, but some privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are skeptical that this approach will do more to protect children online. “Data collection related to age verification poses the same threats that COPPA was designed to address, and we have already seen age estimation systems run into problems with data breaches and leaks,” EFF senior advisor David Greene said in a statement. last year, Reveal the dispute About 70,000 users may have had their government identities exposed in a breach, after they were collected by a third-party vendor to review age appeals. “This is just another sign that the FTC doesn’t really care about young people’s privacy or their rights to expression,” Green said.
But the FTC’s policy statement “makes clear that companies that choose (to) guarantee age must do so in a responsible manner and safeguard against data misuse and inadequate data security,” Susan Bernstein, counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), said in a statement.
The announcement came in the form of a policy statement, which essentially describes how the agency will use its discretion to enforce the law. But the agency indicated it was looking to make the changes more permanent, by revising the ground rule to “address age verification mechanisms.” The FTC said the policy statement will be in effect until it is withdrawn, or the agency publishes a revised version of the rule that modifies its language around age verification technologies.